Retro Roulette #89: Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs (NES, 1990)

I’m back from vacation, and it’s time to play…whatever this is. This can’t actually be its name, can it?

Oh god, it is. Alright, let’s see what we’ve got here.

Kid Kool was released by Vic Tokai for the NES in 1990, and adapted from a Japanese version that was released a couple of years earlier. The game’s central character is a kid based on a real life Japanese child actor who somehow hit it big impersonating a specific baseball player (which is so ridiculous, I couldn’t make it up if I tried). He is also, apparently, very kool.

Just so cool. Or kool, rather. The game is a rather straight forward platformer, without a ton of bells and whistles. You jump on enemies, over gaps, and so forth. On occasion, you get a little red guy who you can throw at enemies, which makes things measurably easier at times (and he boomerangs back to you, which is handy).

You might think that description probably doesn’t sound like much, and you’d be right. If this were exceptionally well-executed, it’d probably still be a decent game, but Kid Kool is…not a decent game. Movement and level design are critical aspects of any good platformer, and both have serious issues. The game’s title kid struggles to jump forward without a significant amount of momentum, meaning that if you didn’t get to much of a running start you probably won’t jump as far as you wanted (possibly even effectively jumping straight up), which means you’ll probably die. The game’s levels do a poor job of accounting for this, and task you with making jumps that are needlessly frustrating. The game’s second level begins with a jump so large that you can’t see where you’ll need to land as you take off, which is just preposterous.

The game also apparently has a night/day mode, which changes some aspects of the game. However, this only changes once every real-time hour of gameplay. Considering the above, I’m guessing very few people even tolerated the game long enough to discover this mechanic (and I don’t blame them). While the concept is interesting, it’s not executed in a way that’s even remotely workable. Nothing about this game makes sense.

Ultimately, Kid Kool is about as misleadingly named as a video game can get. It’s a dull, frustrating game that mildly resembles Super Mario Bros., though it’s worse in every conceivable way. It’s clear what Vic Tokai was going for, but this is just an unenjoyable mess.

Despite not being especially well-liked by anyone Kid Kool received a couple of spiritual sequels. One of those games is Decap Attack, a Genesis exclusive that is actually quite good! You can play that in a few different Genesis compilation releases, including the recent Sega Genesis Classics for modern consoles.

Next week, we’re sticking with another action-y platformer on the NES, though I’m pretty sure this one isn’t hot garbage. It even has dinosaurs, so you’ve got that to look forward to. I’ll see you then.